Obamaisms & media bias

Were he Republican, wouldn’t he by now have been given the same “stupid” label the media gave Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and G.W. Bush?

Investor’s Business Daily has the tally, including:

• “Obama, who isn’t a member of the Senate banking committee, said, ‘”just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran.’”
• Obama: “I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit…”
• Obama: “You know, it’s always a bad practice to say ‘always’ or ‘never’ “
• Obama mentioned that as president he’d “expect to be dealing with [European leaders] over the next eight to 10 years” — 10 years?
• Obama: “Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s.”
• “He [Obama] confused Sioux Falls, S.D., with Sioux City, Iowa, claimed that Arkansas is closer to Kentucky than to Illinois, and called Iran — with population bigger than France’s and a land mass four times that of Germany — ‘a tiny country.’”
• “He [Obama] reckoned that tornadoes had killed 10,000 people in Kansas even though the real number was 12.”

Repetition in the era of mass communication is everything: presidents make no more or less gaffes than they did in the time of Lincoln — whose opponents likewise labeled him stupid, often calling him an “ape” or “monkey.” Sound familiar? — but the difference is it’s repetition in 24-hour news cycles, and whom the media targets and whom they give a break.

A compilation by the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack really gets down to brass tacks — how much money the mainstream media directs towards Democrats. It’s predictable but staggering nonetheless:

Follow the money, writes William Tate:

An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans.

Two-hundred thirty-five journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10-to-1. An even greater disparity, 20-to-1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.

And the International Herald Tribune reports

The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that three newscasts by the traditional networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent 114 minutes covering Obama since June; they spent 48 minutes covering McCain.

While the disparity in coverage of Obama and McCain is revealing, the quality of news coverage is much more important. And the media are all too often willing to give Obama a pass on his distortions.

For example, last night Barack Obama said on NBC: “What I said even at the time of the debate of the surge was that when you put 30,000 American troops on the ground, of course it’s going to have an impact. There’s no doubt about that.”

That’s not true. In January 2007, Obama said that the surge would not reduce the level of violence (see the YouTube video at the link). But Brian Williams never called Obama out on this lie.